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Egypt Independent
“Dozens of women have described shocking sexual assaults by Ethiopian soldiers and allied forces in the country’s Tigray conflict”, an Amnesty International report revealed on Wednesday.
“All of these forces from the very beginning, everywhere, and for a long period of time felt it was perfectly OK with them to perpetrate these crimes, because they clearly felt they could do so with impunity, nothing holding them back”, Donatella Rovera told The Associated Press.
She would not speculate on whether any leader gave the signal to rape, which the report says was intended to humiliate both the women and their Tigrayan ethnic group. “In my years of work investigating atrocities around the world, these are some of the worst”, Rovera said.
“More than 1,200 cases of sexual violence were documented by health centres in Tigray between February and April alone”, Amnesty said. No one knows the real toll during the nine-month conflict. Most of the health facilities across the region of six million people were looted or destroyed.
“These numbers are likely a small fraction of the reality”, Amnesty said after interviewing 63 women, along with health workers.
The AP separately spoke with the women who described being gang-raped by combatants allied with the Ethiopian military, notably soldiers from neighbouring Eritrea but also fighters from the neighbouring Amhara region.
The Amnesty report calls for “accountability for the sexual violence during the conflict”, saying, “rape and sexual slavery constitute war crimes”. It added, “Many women in Tigray now live with the physical and mental effects of the assaults including HIV infections and continued bleeding”.
“Ethiopia’s government has not responded to the report”, Rovera said. On Wednesday, a spokesman for the attorney general’s office did not respond to a request for an update on any investigations.
Earlier this year, the government said three soldiers had been convicted and 25 others indicted for rape and other acts of sexual violence. However, Amnesty said “no information has been made available about those trials or other measures to bring perpetrators to justice”.
Ethiopia’s government did not allow human rights researchers into the Tigray region, though a joint investigation into alleged atrocities is underway by the United Nations human rights office and the government-created Ethiopian Human Rights Commission.
